Web Hosting Glossary

An add-on domain is a domain name that points to a subdirectory within your account. For example, you may want help.net to point to mydomain/help/. Add-on domains must be registered domain names that you own and configured to point to your web site's servers. Add-on domains will only work after nameserver changes.

Anonymous FTP

The ability to access an FTP on which one does not have an account. Usually, anonymous users have more constrained access rights than users with accounts.

Apache

World Wide Web server of Linux which actually host websites.

Applet

Applets, member of Java language. Java applets are commonly used to add effects and interactivity to a website, for anything from text effects to games.

ASP

Active Server Pages. Microsoft server programming technology which actually works server side combined with scripting language like VBScript or JavaScript.

Attachment

A document sends with emails. Basically it is attached with main message of an email that's why its called 'Attachment'. Usually the attachment files are .txt, .doc. It is advisable to scan attached documents through Antivirus software to prevent virus attack.

Auto Responder

Send automatic reply to incoming emails with pre-entered text, sometimes with or without attachment.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth is the total number of bytes you use in a month. The easiest way to explain it is with an example. Let's suppose that you have a page with 5,000 bytes of text and 55,000 bytes of graphics, for a total of 60,000 bytes on your page. If you get 100 hits a day that is 60,000 bytes * 100 or 6 megabytes a day. Now multiply that by 30 days and you get 180 megabytes per month. That's only 3,000 hits in a month (which isn't enough hits to stay in business). Most of the ISP's give you 300 megabytes or so. But what if you have 10 pages the same size or you get 200 hits a day, in both cases you are way over your bandwidth limit.

CGI

A set of rules that describe how a Web server communicates with another application running on the same computer and how the application (called a CGI program) communicates with the Web server. Any application can be a CGI program if it handles input and output according to the CGI standard.

Control Panel

A web based scripting program which allows user to change his/her websites settings for e.g. Package, Email account, Sub-domains, Domain-alias etc. The popular examples are cPanel, WebsitePanel, Plesk Panel.

CSS

A cascading style sheet is a document containing style information that can be referenced by various web pages. Styles define look and layout of content on web pages and allow writers more control over how content is appeared on web browsers.

Dedicated Hosting

A dedicated hosting generally used for a website with a huge amount of traffic that provides special use of hosting computer to its client. It generally obtains on rent or on leased. Client cannot benefit with server only, but he can access connection to Internet, server software. Dedicated server provides large amount of hard disk space, memory capacity and bandwidth limit and generally operated from client's remote location.

To allow user to see a hypertext listing of the files and subdirectories of his account.

DNS

The Internet service responsible for translating a human-readable hostname such as mydomain.com into a numeric IP address (192.168.10.10) for TCP/IP communications.

Domain Aliasing

One domain pointing to another called 'Domain Aliasing. For e.g. test.com -> test.net.

Domain Name

The location of an organization or other entity on the Internet. For example, the address www.mydomain.com locates an Internet address for the domain name "mydomain.com" at a particular IP address and a particular host server named "www".

Domain Parking

You can setup a domain name that you own to point to another domain name. This is known as "Parking" a domain. Example: You own the test.com and test.net domain names. You already have a website for test.com, but you do not want to create a new website for test.net at the moment. By parking test.net on top of test.com, all URLs for test.net will automatically go to test.com instead.

Email Forwarding

To send a copy of an email to another email address is called email forwarding. For e.g. test@mydomain.com -> forward to -> test@ourdomain.com

Firewall

A combination of hardware and software that provides a security system, usually to prevent unauthorized access from outside to an internal network or Intranet.

Forum

A discussion type website, where users raise the questions and another users reply to questions. Different forum contains different type of discussion categories for e.g. Web hosting forum may contain the categories like Control panel, Emails, Resellers, etc.

FrontPage Extension

A set of programs and scripts that support authoring in FrontPage and extend the functionality of a Web server.

FTP

A communication protocol that makes it possible for a user to transfer files between remote locations on a network. This protocol also allows users to use FTP commands, such as listing files and folders, to work with files on a remote location.

HTML

A set of "markup" symbols or tags inserted in a text .le intended for display on a World Wide Web browser. The markup tags tell the Web browser how to display a Web page's content, words and images. HTML is a subset of Standardized Generalized Markup Language (SGML).

HTTP

Internet protocol that carries information on the World Wide Web. Makes it possible for a user with a client program to go through a URL (or click a hyperlink) and get text, graphics, sound, and other digital information from a Web server.

Hyperlink

A hyperlink is a link from one web page or file to another. Hyperlinks open different destinations based on hyperlink nature. For e.g. it can open an email program, another webpage, sound file etc.

A network-layer protocol in the TCP/IP stack. Offering a connectionless Internet work service. IP provides features for addressing, type-of-service specification, fragmentation and reassembly and security.

IP Address

An allocated number used to recognize a computer that is connected to the Internet, much in the same way a telephone number identifies a telephone on a telephone network. An IP address is four numbers separated by periods, such as 172.16.96.1.

ISP (Internet Service Provider)

An industry that provides access to the Internet for e.g., email, chat World Wide Web. Some ISPs are international, offering access in many locations, while others provide access to limited area.

JAVA

A popular OOP programming language used in web technology too.

Mail Server

A server which sends and receives recipient emails.

Mailing List

A list of email addresses. When user sends an email to mailing list, each person added in the mailing list receives an email. Called group emailing too.

MIME

Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension, standard system to recognize the file extension on Internet. Also used for binary attachment in email for e.g., graphics, audio, video.

A program that constitutes the server half of the DNS client-server mechanism. A nameserver contains information about a segment of the DNS database and makes it available to a client called a 'Resolver'. A resolver is often just a library routine that creates queries and sends them across a network to a nameserver.

ODBC

Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) is a programming interface that enables programs to access data in database management systems that use SQL as a data access standard.

OLE

A way to transmit and share information between applications by pasting information created in one application into a document created in another application, such as an MS-Paint or an MS-Word file.

Perl

Practical Extraction and Reporting Language. A programming language used to create CGI programs.

Permissions

To access certain objects, users must have some permission for e.g., in case file permissions it could be write, read, execute, delete, etc.

PHP

Hypertext Preprocessor scripting programming language, open source, widely used server side & embedded into HTML. Generally found on Linux server & good combination of PHP+MySQL.

Ping

An utility that verifies connections to one or more remote hosts. Ping determines and checks that whether a particular IP system on a network is functional. Ping is useful for diagnosing IP network or router failures.

POP3

Post Office Protocol (POP) is a standard protocol for receiving email. POP is a client/server protocol in which email is received and held for you by your Internet server. When you read your email, all of it is immediately downloaded to your computer and no longer maintained on the server. POP3 is built into the Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer browsers. POP can be thought of as a store-and-forward service.

Port

Generally, a connection point on your computer where you can connect devices that pass data into and out of a computer. For example, a printer is typically connected to a parallel port.

Proxy Server

A proxy server acts as an intermediary between your Internal network (Intranet) and the Internet, retrieving files from remote Web servers.

Redirects

A web link points to another web link. For e.g., http://www.mydomain.com/page.asphttp://www.yourdomain.com/home.asp

Registrant

An organization or person registered the domain name with registrar company & who apparently hold the domain ownership.

A processing directive included in HTML files, which works "server side" & generated the data as per browser's requirement.

Shopping Cart

A script or software used in E-Commerce website to purchase and store the products.

SMTP

The TCP/IP standard protocol for transferring electronic mail messages between points on the Internet. SMTP specifies how two mail systems interact and the format of control messages they exchange to transfer mail. SMTP is a protocol for transferring emails between points on the Internet.

SPAM

Unwanted and unsolicited emails sent to people for promoting products or services called SAPM mails or Spamming. An individual or company doing this is called 'Spammer'.

SSH

Secure Shell (SSH), known as Secure Socket Shell also, is a Linux based command line interface and protocol to get secure access of remote computer.

SSL (Secure Socket Layers)

Secure Sockets Layer is a program layer created by Netscape Communications for managing the security of message transmissions in a network. Netscape's idea was that the programming for keeping your messages confidential ought to be contained in a program layer between higher-level protocols (such as HTTP or IMAP) and the TCP/IP layers of the Internet. The "sockets" part of the term refers to the sockets method of passing data between a client and a server program in a network or between program layers in the same computer. SSL allows an SSL-enabled server to authenticate itself to an SSL-enabled client, allows the client to authenticate itself to the server and allows both machines to establish an encrypted connection.

Statistics

A report that shows website visitor's data. i.e. how many times people visited your website, from which browser, from which country & IP address etc. Popular web based statistics are AwStats & WebAlizer.

Sub-domain

A part of main domain that does not include "www". For e.g., http://help.mydomain.com, here "help" is subdomain.

Sub-Web

A subweb is a website nested inside another website. The website that contains a subweb is called a 'root web'.

Telnet

Telnet Client and Telnet Server work together to allow users to communicate with a remote computer. Telnet Client allows users to connect to a remote computer and interact with that computer through a terminal window.

Tickets or Threads

Customer's email or topic or post.

Trace (Tracert)

This utility determines the route taken to a destination by sending echo packets to the destination. For e.g., tracert mydomain.com will display different destination route from your PC to destination server. Useful to find breakage between routes.

URL

Uniform Resource Locator (URL): An address that states a protocol (such as HTTP or FTP) and a location of an object, document, World Wide Web page, or other target on the Internet or an Intranet.

Virtual Directory

Directory name that points or refer to physical location of directory on server.

A computer that hosts Web pages and answers to requests from web browsers (Internet Explorer, Netscape navigator, etc). Also known as an HTTP server, a Web server stores files whose URLs begin with http://.